Insecure Minds Wired for Pattern-Finding

Oct. 2, 2008 -- A perfectly healthy human mind can trick itself into seeing things that are not there, and new research has exposed exactly the sort of conditions under which that happens.

It turns out that the less control a person feels, the more likely they are to see patterns or make connections that don't exist. The good news is there is a way to fortify yourself against this sort of hard-wired self-deception.

"It's true that having control is a big thing for most people," said researcher Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University. Galinsky is a co-author of a paper reporting on new experiments into the matter, which appears in the Oct. 3 issue of the journal Science. "We showed that it's a very significant problem."

Previous research had hinted at the details of the strange human habit, said Galinsky. A study in the 1970s showed how during hard economic times people read more astrology books and columns (astronomy reading was unchanged, for comparison). There is also evidence that UFO sightings ramp up in times of high national stress.

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These phenomena are probably related to that found by Galinsky and lead author Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas, Austin, under controlled conditions in the lab.

Whitson and Galinsky designed six experiments in which some people were made to feel a lack of control and others were not. Then they measured the subjects' perception of images in pictures that contained both hard-to-see patterns or no pattern at all. In another experiment, the researchers tested how people perceive patterns in stock prices.